WINTER IN AMERICA…how construction workers should respond to the meltdown
Today, the skyline of Manhattan is dotted with abandoned luxury hirises – from the narrow streets of Tribeca to the broad boulevards of Harlem, the city is filled with expensive buildings abandoned in mid project.
And it goes beyond Manhattan, to the other four boroughs – and beyond here, to every community in the nation, from the deserts of Southern Utah to the swamps of Florida, from the rainy suburbs of Seattle to the rocky coast of Massachussets Bay.
And beyond America – from Dublin to Dubai, from Mexico City to Hong Kong, and from Johannesburg to London, the construction industry is in a very deep crisis (remember, when the general economy catches a cold, the building trades catch pneumonia!)
Our industry is bearing the brunt of the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes – the question is, what the hell can we as construction workers do about it?
We know what the contractors want – from the New York Building Congress to the Irish Construction Industry Federation, they’re demanding pay cuts, longer work days and the elimination of hard won benefits.
Here in New York City, the contractors want a 25% cut in wages and benefits, a wage freeze, plus the elimination of the 7 hour day (won by our unions way back in 1936, during the last Great Depression), a reduction in the number of holidays (which – except for the electricians, and foremen in other trades - we don’t even get paid for anyway!) and making us ride the hoist on our own time on hirise jobs and only paying us when we get to the floor we are working on (if you’ve ever had to wait 20 minutes to get in a crowded hoist, you know what a hardship this will be).
It appears that the construction unions are prepared to knuckle under to this – from the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council to Electricians local 3 to the New York City District Council of Carpenters, the message we’re getting is that we have to knuckle under to the contractors demands.
Problem is, that will just make matters worse!
It will only widen the divide between Company Men (they are the minority of union construction workers who are steady employees of contractors – often the bosses friends, relatives or people of the same race or nationality as the boss) and Local Men (the vast majority of union tradespeopke, they are casually employed men and women dispatched from the union hall to be temporary employees on the jobsites) – the Company guys will get more work, and there will be that many less jobs for the Local Men.
It will also embolden the contractors to ask for more givebacks.
Just look at the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers – they gave the bosses in their industries whatever they wanted, and their employers kept coming back for more and more and more and more!
And it won’t solve our worst problem – over the last 40 years, our industry here in New York has gone from a 100% union 250,000 worker business to a 50% scab industry of only 200,000 – and many of our non union brothers and sisters only get paid $ 7 an hour, in cash, off the books, with no benefits whatsoever not even Social Security, Unemployment Insurance or Workers Comp!
And that’s our future if we give in to the contractors!
Do we really want to go subminimum?
There is another way – and we can look to our brothers and sisters in the building trades overseas for part of the answer.
The UITBB, a Helsinki, Finland-based international association of progressive, socialist and communist led construction unions in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America, has called for a shorter work week, and defense of the rights of immigrant tradespeople.
The Union of Construction and Technical Trades [UCATT] the main construction union in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, has echoed UITBB’s call and further advocated for a campaign to expand public housing projects in the UK and Ireland.
UITBB and UCATT’s ideas are excellent, and we need to follow their lead on this side of the Atlantic!
First of all, we need to preserve the 7 hour day, and even go further – to a 6 hour day, with double time for all OT. Yes, that will cut down on the amount of OT that individual workers get – but the original purpose of overtime pay was to make it so expensive to work a long day that bosses would hire more people.
And with so much unemployment, we need to get more people working.
Second, we need to strengthen the hiring hall system – this is especially true for the District Council of Carpenters! At the very least, 50% of the crew should be Local Men hired from the out of work list - genuine Local Men – not Company Men that are requested off the list by the contractor!
The “Request System” (or “Portability” as it’s known in the rest of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America) enables contractors to pick and choose which union members they hire – often the only genuine local man on a job is the Shop Steward!
This has got to go!
At least half the crew should be genuine local men, taken in order from off the out of work list.
I would even go further, and advocate a 90/10 system, where only 10% of the crew would be company men, with the bulk of the crew Local Men hired from off the out of work list.
In times like these, we need equal distribution of work!
Other trades should make similar revisions in their hiring hall systems.
We also need a supplemental fund to provide for the unemployed members - some trades (the Electricians) have this, we all should.
If it means diverting scheduled wage increases into an unemployed members fund for a few years, than that’s what we’ll have to do!
We also have to get serious about organizing the unorganized!
Nationally 90% of our business is non union – here in NYC it’s 50%, and they do a majority of the work (in residential, every apartment house shorter than 12 stories in this city is built non union!)
We have to change that!
And not by one contractor at a time NLRB representation elections, but through area-wide strikes – make all the scab contractors go union at the same time, which will eliminate the number 1 excuse those bosses give for not wanting to go union, that their competitors will still be paying scab wages, so they’ll be forced out of business.
It’s actually a legit reason – but if they all go union at once, it’s no longer valid!
We also need to take on union contractors that violate their union agreements by paying cash off the books with no benefits – that kind of union scabbing has got to be stopped, by strikes against those contractors to force them to comply with the collective bargaining agreements they signed!
We also have to look to the demands of the broader working class.
One burning demand – especially in New York City and other high rent urban areas (Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland) is for affordable housing.
In New York City, we have an easy answer before us – all those abandoned buildings stopped in mid build because the banks cut off the developer’s credit line!
We should demand that the City of New York use eminent domain to seize those abandoned buildings, use public funds to finish building them and turn them over to the New York City Housing Authority to serve as low income housing.
Suddenly dropping thousands of low income units into the housing market will serve to pull down overall rents, opening up housing opportunities for the middle income population.
The landlords and developers (the folks that our union leaders frequently tell us are our “friends”) will oppose this tooth and nail, along with their allies in the corporate media – among other things, they will use thinly veiled racial innuendo to attack the very idea of public housing.
But we have to oppose them, and reach out to our brothers and sisters who need affordable housing – they, not the real estate financiers, are our real friends!
We also have to deal with the racial disparities in our industry.
Thanks in part to years of protests and jobsite struggles by the Coalitions and other minority workers rights groups and in part to deunionization, our industry, at least in New York City, is majority workers of color these days.
But, we need to guarantee that Black, Latino, Chinese, South Asian and American Indian men, and women of all colors, have an opportunity to get the industry’s best paying jobs.
And nationally, where construction unions are still overwhelmingly segregated, even in heavily African American cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland and St Louis, there is an urgent burning need for desegregation.
Especially since, even in the best of times, workers of color are the “last hired and first fired” and their unemployment rates – especially for young people of color – are far higher than for the White community.
In hard times, that disparity is even greater.
To further the aim of equally distributing the work among workers of all different backgrounds, I would call for an Affirmative Action plan, with quotas, that would require in the New York City area that 60% of all apprenticeship opportunities go to Black, Latino, Asian or Native American men, and 20% go to women.
To make sure those minority and female apprentices actually get work, and that they are able to get employment upon graduation – and to provide work for the current minority and female journelevel population, there would also need to be hiring quotas imposed on the contractors
Those quotas would have to be adjusted based on local conditions – for instance, in Detroit, which is 93% Black, the quota would be set accordingly.
For any who might whine about so called “reverse discrimination” – remember, for over 100 years, our unions excluded most men of color, and all women, and in much of America the building trades unions are still a bastion of de facto segregation (as the construction industry as a whole becomes more and more heavily Latino by the day)…a few decades of giving a helping hand to those locked out workers is simple justice!
Also, we have to reach out to our immigrant brothers and sisters, who make up a majority of the construction workforce in this city, and almost a third of the trades across the country.
This means joining hands with them to demand full unconditional amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and immediate green card status to all immigrants presently in the country.
That means demanding immediate green card status for all indentured tradespeople in the H-1B visa program, and the abolition of all indentured non immigrant labor visa programs.
They are virtual slaves to their bosses, and can be deported at a contractor’s whim. They are often brutally superexploited and horribly underpaid, it’s about time they got some justice, and we need to help them.
That also means demanding reform of American immigration laws, so both the relatives of immigrants living in America and unemployed workers and NAFTA-displaced farmers have access to the US labor market.
We need to break out of the building trades parochialism that has been a major construction union problem over the last 140 years!
By fighting for immigrants rights, Affirmative Action and public housing, as well as our own construction worker-specific demands, we’d be able to break out of that box once and for all.
There are lots of potential allies here – after all, New York City has over 1 million union members, more than any other American city, and another 3 million non union workers.
For instance, we could reach out to the building service workers unions, local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters City Employees Union local 237 to support our demands for more public housing, which would mean more jobs for their members.
We could also get support for our housing demands from unions that represent low paid workers – District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United Healthcare Workers East local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE-HERE locals 6, 23-25 and 169 – who’s members badly need decent, safe affordable housing within reasonable commuting distance of their jobs.
There are also lots of community organizations that organize around the housing issues – we could bring them on board too (while, of course, expecting those groups that build and operate low income housing programs to build their projects 100% union and to have an all union building maintenance workforce in their existing properties – after all, solidarity is a two way street!)
And we’ll find plenty of allies on the Affirmative Action and immigrant amnesty questions among African American and immigrants organizations, and among religious leaders in those communities.
One thing we should absolutely NOT do anymore is to totally subordinate ourselves and our unions to the contractors, the developers and their trade associations.
Louis Colletti is not our friend – neither is Donald Trump – or Larry Silverstein – or Steve Ross – or Bruce Ratner – or any of the other developers… they are our class enemies, the people we have to struggle against to get what we need, both narrowly as construction workers and more broadly as part of the working class.
We and our unions need to stop being shills for their narrow commercial interests and their taxpayer subsidized megadevelopments!
Remember, the only difference between them and the Shaya Boymelgreens, John Lams and Donald Cappoccias of the world is that, for the moment, they find it useful to deal with the unions – I would hope we all understand that they would cut our throats in a minute if it was to their commercial advantage!
The politicians aren’t our friends either – no, not even the Democrats!
Yes, they speak at our rallies, and say all the right things, but at the end of the day, they represent the same financial interests the Republicans do!
Even President-Elect Barack Obama – yes, even with all of that “change you can believe in” rhetoric, and all the “pro labor” posturing, and the appointment of a congresswoman who’s highly regarded by AFL-CIO lobbyists as the Secretary of Labor, and all this talk of a stimulus package, he’s not going to save us either!
Barack Obama is a “communitaritan” – that is, he believes that everybody has a common interest – capitalist and worker, rich and poor, Whites and people of color ect – but that those common interests can only be achieved when the less privileged give up their independent demands, and subordinate themselves to the powerful.
In our case, that means that we should unite with the contractors ON THE CONTRACTORS TERMS.
Or, in the case of working class tenants, Obama’s communitarianism would lead them to work for unity with the slumlords – on the basis of the demands of the slumlords!
Beyond those broad philosophical issues, in practical terms, Obama has already carried out actions that are specifically against the interests of construction workers.
The president-elect’s pick for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has played a major role in busting construction unions and in perverting low income housing programs in New York City.
As Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Donovan continued the 31 year long policy, originated by another Democrat, Mayor Ed Koch, of laundering public housing renovation funds through private not for profit social service agencies, to evade paying Davis Bacon prevailing wages.
It is largely thanks to that policy that New York City’s residential construction sector went from over 80% union in the 1970’s to under 20% union today.
And the lowest paying most abusive scab contractors – the guys who pay their tradespeople $ 7 an hour and won’t even pay their hospital bills when they get hurt on the job – are the firms that do HPD work.
And, the developers that superexploit our non union brothers and sisters are the same folks who, with HPD’s almost certain knowledge, use HPD’s low income housing funding to construct luxury housing for New York City’s rich.
In a city desperately in need of homes for the low income working class, this is outrageous!
One New York City neighborhood in particular, Central Harlem, saw a wave of gentrification under Donovan’s watch – longtime low income African American, African immigrant and Latino working class residents were displaced and replaced by affluent White professionals and businesspeople, living in luxury housing built by $7 an hour labor funded by HPD’s low income housing subsidies.
Donovan’s advancement to the national stage is a bad sign – perhaps this is how the construction segment of Obama’s stimulus package will be run?
Considering the attacks our brothers and sisters in the United Auto Workers have faced from the federal government (including “labor’s friends” the Democrats) why should we expect any less of an assault on our unions?
For those of us in New York, who’s unions have groaned under the yoke of years of federal intervention, we know very well the feds’ attitude towards organized labor!
Also, for years there have been rumblings from Washington about repealing or gutting Davis Bacon protections of workers on federal jobs – perhaps Obama is the man who can pull that off – AND make it look like he’s doing workers a favor!
Bottom line, we as workers need political independence from the capitalists – a good start would be a break with the Democratic Party!
Ultimately, we as workers need to take power from the financiers, industrialists and contractors, and to rule society on our own behalf. It’s a long road to that goal, but a good start is a program of struggle like I outlined above.
Remember, it takes a fight to win!
- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 608 CARPENTER
for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/
http://gangbox.wordpress.com
http://www.clnews.com
“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER!”
Today, the skyline of Manhattan is dotted with abandoned luxury hirises – from the narrow streets of Tribeca to the broad boulevards of Harlem, the city is filled with expensive buildings abandoned in mid project.
And it goes beyond Manhattan, to the other four boroughs – and beyond here, to every community in the nation, from the deserts of Southern Utah to the swamps of Florida, from the rainy suburbs of Seattle to the rocky coast of Massachussets Bay.
And beyond America – from Dublin to Dubai, from Mexico City to Hong Kong, and from Johannesburg to London, the construction industry is in a very deep crisis (remember, when the general economy catches a cold, the building trades catch pneumonia!)
Our industry is bearing the brunt of the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes – the question is, what the hell can we as construction workers do about it?
We know what the contractors want – from the New York Building Congress to the Irish Construction Industry Federation, they’re demanding pay cuts, longer work days and the elimination of hard won benefits.
Here in New York City, the contractors want a 25% cut in wages and benefits, a wage freeze, plus the elimination of the 7 hour day (won by our unions way back in 1936, during the last Great Depression), a reduction in the number of holidays (which – except for the electricians, and foremen in other trades - we don’t even get paid for anyway!) and making us ride the hoist on our own time on hirise jobs and only paying us when we get to the floor we are working on (if you’ve ever had to wait 20 minutes to get in a crowded hoist, you know what a hardship this will be).
It appears that the construction unions are prepared to knuckle under to this – from the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council to Electricians local 3 to the New York City District Council of Carpenters, the message we’re getting is that we have to knuckle under to the contractors demands.
Problem is, that will just make matters worse!
It will only widen the divide between Company Men (they are the minority of union construction workers who are steady employees of contractors – often the bosses friends, relatives or people of the same race or nationality as the boss) and Local Men (the vast majority of union tradespeopke, they are casually employed men and women dispatched from the union hall to be temporary employees on the jobsites) – the Company guys will get more work, and there will be that many less jobs for the Local Men.
It will also embolden the contractors to ask for more givebacks.
Just look at the Teamsters or the United Auto Workers – they gave the bosses in their industries whatever they wanted, and their employers kept coming back for more and more and more and more!
And it won’t solve our worst problem – over the last 40 years, our industry here in New York has gone from a 100% union 250,000 worker business to a 50% scab industry of only 200,000 – and many of our non union brothers and sisters only get paid $ 7 an hour, in cash, off the books, with no benefits whatsoever not even Social Security, Unemployment Insurance or Workers Comp!
And that’s our future if we give in to the contractors!
Do we really want to go subminimum?
There is another way – and we can look to our brothers and sisters in the building trades overseas for part of the answer.
The UITBB, a Helsinki, Finland-based international association of progressive, socialist and communist led construction unions in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America, has called for a shorter work week, and defense of the rights of immigrant tradespeople.
The Union of Construction and Technical Trades [UCATT] the main construction union in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, has echoed UITBB’s call and further advocated for a campaign to expand public housing projects in the UK and Ireland.
UITBB and UCATT’s ideas are excellent, and we need to follow their lead on this side of the Atlantic!
First of all, we need to preserve the 7 hour day, and even go further – to a 6 hour day, with double time for all OT. Yes, that will cut down on the amount of OT that individual workers get – but the original purpose of overtime pay was to make it so expensive to work a long day that bosses would hire more people.
And with so much unemployment, we need to get more people working.
Second, we need to strengthen the hiring hall system – this is especially true for the District Council of Carpenters! At the very least, 50% of the crew should be Local Men hired from the out of work list - genuine Local Men – not Company Men that are requested off the list by the contractor!
The “Request System” (or “Portability” as it’s known in the rest of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America) enables contractors to pick and choose which union members they hire – often the only genuine local man on a job is the Shop Steward!
This has got to go!
At least half the crew should be genuine local men, taken in order from off the out of work list.
I would even go further, and advocate a 90/10 system, where only 10% of the crew would be company men, with the bulk of the crew Local Men hired from off the out of work list.
In times like these, we need equal distribution of work!
Other trades should make similar revisions in their hiring hall systems.
We also need a supplemental fund to provide for the unemployed members - some trades (the Electricians) have this, we all should.
If it means diverting scheduled wage increases into an unemployed members fund for a few years, than that’s what we’ll have to do!
We also have to get serious about organizing the unorganized!
Nationally 90% of our business is non union – here in NYC it’s 50%, and they do a majority of the work (in residential, every apartment house shorter than 12 stories in this city is built non union!)
We have to change that!
And not by one contractor at a time NLRB representation elections, but through area-wide strikes – make all the scab contractors go union at the same time, which will eliminate the number 1 excuse those bosses give for not wanting to go union, that their competitors will still be paying scab wages, so they’ll be forced out of business.
It’s actually a legit reason – but if they all go union at once, it’s no longer valid!
We also need to take on union contractors that violate their union agreements by paying cash off the books with no benefits – that kind of union scabbing has got to be stopped, by strikes against those contractors to force them to comply with the collective bargaining agreements they signed!
We also have to look to the demands of the broader working class.
One burning demand – especially in New York City and other high rent urban areas (Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland) is for affordable housing.
In New York City, we have an easy answer before us – all those abandoned buildings stopped in mid build because the banks cut off the developer’s credit line!
We should demand that the City of New York use eminent domain to seize those abandoned buildings, use public funds to finish building them and turn them over to the New York City Housing Authority to serve as low income housing.
Suddenly dropping thousands of low income units into the housing market will serve to pull down overall rents, opening up housing opportunities for the middle income population.
The landlords and developers (the folks that our union leaders frequently tell us are our “friends”) will oppose this tooth and nail, along with their allies in the corporate media – among other things, they will use thinly veiled racial innuendo to attack the very idea of public housing.
But we have to oppose them, and reach out to our brothers and sisters who need affordable housing – they, not the real estate financiers, are our real friends!
We also have to deal with the racial disparities in our industry.
Thanks in part to years of protests and jobsite struggles by the Coalitions and other minority workers rights groups and in part to deunionization, our industry, at least in New York City, is majority workers of color these days.
But, we need to guarantee that Black, Latino, Chinese, South Asian and American Indian men, and women of all colors, have an opportunity to get the industry’s best paying jobs.
And nationally, where construction unions are still overwhelmingly segregated, even in heavily African American cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, Oakland and St Louis, there is an urgent burning need for desegregation.
Especially since, even in the best of times, workers of color are the “last hired and first fired” and their unemployment rates – especially for young people of color – are far higher than for the White community.
In hard times, that disparity is even greater.
To further the aim of equally distributing the work among workers of all different backgrounds, I would call for an Affirmative Action plan, with quotas, that would require in the New York City area that 60% of all apprenticeship opportunities go to Black, Latino, Asian or Native American men, and 20% go to women.
To make sure those minority and female apprentices actually get work, and that they are able to get employment upon graduation – and to provide work for the current minority and female journelevel population, there would also need to be hiring quotas imposed on the contractors
Those quotas would have to be adjusted based on local conditions – for instance, in Detroit, which is 93% Black, the quota would be set accordingly.
For any who might whine about so called “reverse discrimination” – remember, for over 100 years, our unions excluded most men of color, and all women, and in much of America the building trades unions are still a bastion of de facto segregation (as the construction industry as a whole becomes more and more heavily Latino by the day)…a few decades of giving a helping hand to those locked out workers is simple justice!
Also, we have to reach out to our immigrant brothers and sisters, who make up a majority of the construction workforce in this city, and almost a third of the trades across the country.
This means joining hands with them to demand full unconditional amnesty for undocumented immigrants, and immediate green card status to all immigrants presently in the country.
That means demanding immediate green card status for all indentured tradespeople in the H-1B visa program, and the abolition of all indentured non immigrant labor visa programs.
They are virtual slaves to their bosses, and can be deported at a contractor’s whim. They are often brutally superexploited and horribly underpaid, it’s about time they got some justice, and we need to help them.
That also means demanding reform of American immigration laws, so both the relatives of immigrants living in America and unemployed workers and NAFTA-displaced farmers have access to the US labor market.
We need to break out of the building trades parochialism that has been a major construction union problem over the last 140 years!
By fighting for immigrants rights, Affirmative Action and public housing, as well as our own construction worker-specific demands, we’d be able to break out of that box once and for all.
There are lots of potential allies here – after all, New York City has over 1 million union members, more than any other American city, and another 3 million non union workers.
For instance, we could reach out to the building service workers unions, local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters City Employees Union local 237 to support our demands for more public housing, which would mean more jobs for their members.
We could also get support for our housing demands from unions that represent low paid workers – District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, United Healthcare Workers East local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE-HERE locals 6, 23-25 and 169 – who’s members badly need decent, safe affordable housing within reasonable commuting distance of their jobs.
There are also lots of community organizations that organize around the housing issues – we could bring them on board too (while, of course, expecting those groups that build and operate low income housing programs to build their projects 100% union and to have an all union building maintenance workforce in their existing properties – after all, solidarity is a two way street!)
And we’ll find plenty of allies on the Affirmative Action and immigrant amnesty questions among African American and immigrants organizations, and among religious leaders in those communities.
One thing we should absolutely NOT do anymore is to totally subordinate ourselves and our unions to the contractors, the developers and their trade associations.
Louis Colletti is not our friend – neither is Donald Trump – or Larry Silverstein – or Steve Ross – or Bruce Ratner – or any of the other developers… they are our class enemies, the people we have to struggle against to get what we need, both narrowly as construction workers and more broadly as part of the working class.
We and our unions need to stop being shills for their narrow commercial interests and their taxpayer subsidized megadevelopments!
Remember, the only difference between them and the Shaya Boymelgreens, John Lams and Donald Cappoccias of the world is that, for the moment, they find it useful to deal with the unions – I would hope we all understand that they would cut our throats in a minute if it was to their commercial advantage!
The politicians aren’t our friends either – no, not even the Democrats!
Yes, they speak at our rallies, and say all the right things, but at the end of the day, they represent the same financial interests the Republicans do!
Even President-Elect Barack Obama – yes, even with all of that “change you can believe in” rhetoric, and all the “pro labor” posturing, and the appointment of a congresswoman who’s highly regarded by AFL-CIO lobbyists as the Secretary of Labor, and all this talk of a stimulus package, he’s not going to save us either!
Barack Obama is a “communitaritan” – that is, he believes that everybody has a common interest – capitalist and worker, rich and poor, Whites and people of color ect – but that those common interests can only be achieved when the less privileged give up their independent demands, and subordinate themselves to the powerful.
In our case, that means that we should unite with the contractors ON THE CONTRACTORS TERMS.
Or, in the case of working class tenants, Obama’s communitarianism would lead them to work for unity with the slumlords – on the basis of the demands of the slumlords!
Beyond those broad philosophical issues, in practical terms, Obama has already carried out actions that are specifically against the interests of construction workers.
The president-elect’s pick for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has played a major role in busting construction unions and in perverting low income housing programs in New York City.
As Commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Donovan continued the 31 year long policy, originated by another Democrat, Mayor Ed Koch, of laundering public housing renovation funds through private not for profit social service agencies, to evade paying Davis Bacon prevailing wages.
It is largely thanks to that policy that New York City’s residential construction sector went from over 80% union in the 1970’s to under 20% union today.
And the lowest paying most abusive scab contractors – the guys who pay their tradespeople $ 7 an hour and won’t even pay their hospital bills when they get hurt on the job – are the firms that do HPD work.
And, the developers that superexploit our non union brothers and sisters are the same folks who, with HPD’s almost certain knowledge, use HPD’s low income housing funding to construct luxury housing for New York City’s rich.
In a city desperately in need of homes for the low income working class, this is outrageous!
One New York City neighborhood in particular, Central Harlem, saw a wave of gentrification under Donovan’s watch – longtime low income African American, African immigrant and Latino working class residents were displaced and replaced by affluent White professionals and businesspeople, living in luxury housing built by $7 an hour labor funded by HPD’s low income housing subsidies.
Donovan’s advancement to the national stage is a bad sign – perhaps this is how the construction segment of Obama’s stimulus package will be run?
Considering the attacks our brothers and sisters in the United Auto Workers have faced from the federal government (including “labor’s friends” the Democrats) why should we expect any less of an assault on our unions?
For those of us in New York, who’s unions have groaned under the yoke of years of federal intervention, we know very well the feds’ attitude towards organized labor!
Also, for years there have been rumblings from Washington about repealing or gutting Davis Bacon protections of workers on federal jobs – perhaps Obama is the man who can pull that off – AND make it look like he’s doing workers a favor!
Bottom line, we as workers need political independence from the capitalists – a good start would be a break with the Democratic Party!
Ultimately, we as workers need to take power from the financiers, industrialists and contractors, and to rule society on our own behalf. It’s a long road to that goal, but a good start is a program of struggle like I outlined above.
Remember, it takes a fight to win!
- commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 608 CARPENTER
for GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gangboxnews/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gangbox/ http://gangbox.wordpress.com http://www.clnews.com “UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER!”
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